Math-challenged reverend hijacks plane with cans of hommus

“He is a reverend,” Garcia Luna said. “He said it was a divine revelation that drove him to this action.”

What a lunatic! Praise the Lord that this is the only case ever where divine revelation has driven anyone to commit dangerous acts like this one.

The hijacker was wearing jeans and a white shirt when he was paraded in front of reporters after his arrest and appeared to be smiling and chewing gum. He took action because yesterday’s date, Sept. 9, 2009, represented an upside-down 666.

I guess that's why nothing like this happened on June 6th, 2006, because that's 999 upside-down, and that doesn't mean anything.

The story gets better:

Flores is a born-again Christian who had been on the verge of suicide. He spent time in jail in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for armed robbery, Garcia Luna said.

Flores threatened the crew from Aeromexico flight 576 with a fake bomb made from a red light affixed to three cans of hummus about an hour after takeoff from Cancun, Garcia Luna said. The pilot told the authorities and later acted as interlocutor between Flores and officials once the plane landed in Mexico City at about 1:40 p.m. local time.

Three cans of hommus. As the saying goes, you can't make this stuff up. Soon they'll ban food on planes altogether.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.